"These Baby Blogging pictures are old hat," says SteelyKid. "I could do this standing on my head!" You can't really tell from the angle, but she's laughing. This is a game we play from time to time-- I'll tip her over backwards, gently lower her down to the floor, and say "BONK!" Then I pick her back up, and she giggles and laughs and grins hugely. I suspect she's going to share her mother's love of roller coasters.

I have two labs today, and a lunch meeting, so no time for detailed blogging about science. It's been a while since I did a Dorky Poll, though, so here's one to keep people entertained while I'm working: What's your favorite color? "What's dorky about that?" you ask. You need to give your answer in wavelength units. For extra bonus dorky points, specify an atomic transition of approximately that wavelength. Personally, I'm kind of partial to the blue-green lines in helium, right around 501 nm. That's a nice color. The violet line in the hydrogen spectrum, around 435 nm, is also pretty good.…

Confessions of a Community College Dean: The Boy, On Scientists "My hero is a scientist. Every day they mak EXITING discoveries. They also make AWESOME potions, space probes and cool new ships. They launch rockets and space ships. I like it when the Space Shuttle goes up. It always makes me think of the scientists who made it. Scientists are really cool!" (tags: science kid-stuff dean-dad) EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect "One of the quirks of the elite political debate is that it tends to occur in dense cities with extremely impressive transportation infrastructures. DC. New…

I got email this afternoon from Andrei Derevianko, the leader of the research project badly described by the press release mentioned in the previous post. He sounds a little surprised by the whole thing (though not much more surprised than I am that my griping on the Internet got brought to anybody's attention), and explains what happened: The original story (that I have went through with a writer) is posted here: www.unr.edu. Unfortunately, the release writers have added introductory paragraph and the title without consulting with me (I was travelling giving talk about our result). Now…

A wonderfully incoherent press release came across my EurekAlert feeds yesterday, with the headline "Particle physics study finds new data for extra Z-bosons and potential fifth force of nature." You can tell it's going to make no sense at all from the very first sentence: The Large Hadron Collider is an enormous particle accelerator whose 17-mile tunnel straddles the borders of France and Switzerland. A group of physicists at the University of Nevada, Reno has analyzed data from the accelerator that could ultimately prove or disprove the possibility of a fifth force of nature. As the largest…

I've had the Quiche Moraine post on editing open in a browser tab for far too long, now, but it deserves a more prominent comment than just a link in the daily links dump. It really is an excellent presentation of the important role of editing: Editing requires the strange ability to stand in the place of the audience and the author simultaneously. As an editor reads a piece, whether it be a story or a journal article, they have to understand what the author intended to say without losing track of not just what one individual reader will take away, but how the piece will come across to…

Gallery: Flickr users make accidental maps - tech - 27 April 2009 - New Scientist "Billions of photos have now been uploaded to the internet, and many are tagged with text descriptions. Some are even geotagged â stamped with the latitude and longitude coordinates at which the image was taken. David Crandall and colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, analysed the data attached to 35 million photographs uploaded to the Flickr website to create accurate global and city maps and identify popular snapping sites." (tags: science social-science pictures internet maps) A House Not…

So, the President gave some sort of speech to a bunch of smart people yesterday (video, transcript), and hearts are a-flutter all over the science blogosphere, as President Obama promises great things for science: We double the budget of key agencies, including the National Science Foundation, a primary source of funding for academic research, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which supports a wide range of pursuits - from improving health information technology to measuring carbon pollution, from testing "smart grid" designs to developing advanced manufacturing…

Yesterday, EurekAlert served up a press release titled New blow for dinosaur-killing asteroid theory, reporting on Gerta Keller of Princeton, who says that the Chicxulub crater isn't really from the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs. Keller thinks the crater had nothing to do with the extinction event, and claims to have found evidence that the impact was as much as 300,000 years before the dinosaurs died out. One or two of the quotes in the piece sounded kind of snotty for a scientific report, but I marked this down as something to look at later. Later in the day, Ethan "Nitro"…

Well, it is. What with the jumping around, and the giggling, and waving toys in the air, and the tickling and giggling, and taking a walk in the stroller... It just tires a baby right out. (If you've clicked through to warn us that letting SteelyKid sleep on her stomach is Incredibly! Dangerous! and May Cause Instant Death!!!, please don't. We've heard it.)

My major "service" activity at work is involvement with the Minerva program, which attempts to blur the line between academic and residential life. I enjoy this because it gives me the opportunity to work closely with students outside a narrow academic context, and I've been very impressed with the creativity and responsibility of the students involved. Part of the program is also to get faculty involved, and this runs into more problems. The biggest of which is probably a mismatch between the time scales on which students and faculty operate. If you try to get faculty to do something in the…

Acephalous: Concerning the inherent superiority of printed text to irresponsible online drivel. "Is it absolutely necessary for the image gracing the cover of the most recent issue of the official mouthpiece of my professional organization to depict something that, when seen on my desk by a colleague from another department, compelled her to ask where a viper fish would even get a detachable penis to whack off against a shrimp-wielding toucan? Do other departments not laugh at us enough already?" (tags: blogs academia silly art humanities acephalous) Intimate Homicide | Mother Jones "I'll…

I'd like to interrupt the ongoing discussion of how we're in the early chapters of The Stand for a quick question about what really matters: the cute behaviors of my dog. There's probably a technical term for that thing dogs do where their back legs twitch when you scratch them in just the right spot. I'm not sure what it would be, though-- Kate and I tend to use "reflex arc" as a shorthand, but when I was a kid it was described to me as the equivalent of tickling a dog, so I tend to think of it that way. Anyway, we give Emmy Advantix as a flea and tick preventative, which works really well.…

Back in the stone ages, when I was a student and walked uphill through the snow to class, if you wanted assistance on a homework assignment, you needed to track the instructor of the class down in person, either by going to their posted office hours, or calling them on the phone to set up an appointment. With the introduction of modern communications technology, it is now possible to interact with your instructor electronically, and get help on your homework at times when you couldn't hope to meet them in person. While this is a tremendous improvement over the old way of doing things, here…

LiveLeak.com - Smart Mutt How to get your tennis ball out of the pool without swimming. (tags: silly video animals dog)

I've had an article called How to Set Up a Blog (For the Long Run) open in a browser tab for long enough that I no longer remember what first sent me to it. Which is probably a good thing, because it's irritating as hell: Life-saving market research tip #2: Use Google. If you do a search for the biggest keyword for your potential blog topic, you want to see lots of organic results and sponsored sponsored results. You especially want to see sponsored results if you want to have any hope of making money with your blog. The presence of sponsored results means there's action in the marketplace…

ROCKET SCIENCE « Pundit Kitchen: Lol News and Lol Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, John McCain, Joe Biden and more "It really is that hard, but the results kick ass." (tags: science astronomy space silly pictures internet) http://www.mat.univie.ac.at/~neum/physics-faq.txt "This document (a simple ASCII file) contains answers to some more or less frequently asked questions from theoretical physics. Currently, the FAQ contains 148 topics, grouped into 20 chapters, and filling over 10000 lines of text (about half a megabyte), corresponding to a book of about 200 pages. Starting in 2004, the…

Chad Orzel now knows more than he would like to about the loathsome political views of some old acquaintances. Chad Orzel is pretty sure the people in question don't read the blog, or at least won't know he's talking about them. Chad Orzel is grateful for the feature that allows him to stop receiving those updates. Chad Orzel really wishes he had better killfile options, though. Chad Orzel longs for a Fire Upon the Deep style sentient AI killfile. Chad Orzel also wants better tools for distinguishing spam comments from slightly off-kilter real comments. Chad Orzel has nothing substantive to…

A lot of ignorance neednât stop you from offering contradictory theories § Unqualified Offerings "I have no particular opinion on why there is a gender gap in certain fields of science. I have a lot of skepticism for various theories offered, but I have no theory of my own. And it isnât just because itâs a hot potato issue where it would be easy to put a foot in my mouth. I really, honestly, find many explanations wanting." (tags: science blogs education academia gender diversity unqualified-offerings) Learning Curves: Please Learn How to Write a Survey "Let's say the book features "…

SteelyKid says "Look at me! I'm HUGE!" Seriously, look at how small she used to be. This is it as far as blogging today, by the way. I have to teach a class, and then I need to get through the copyedits on the book-in-production. Try to contain your disappointment.